CmdrTaco's Journal: OSX, Buffy, Smallville, Code (But not in that order)

Tonight's code refresh will bring phase one of the new user interface live. It is a very small start, but hopefully more will be forthcoming. If people have issues with the HTML, I'd love emails with corrections for browser compatibility. Its a little convoluted, but it works pretty well in the various versions of Konq, Moz, and IE that we tested.

Smallville season premiere rocked my socks. The finale last season was excellent, and this picked right up. The show itself is spotty, but when its good, its great. Buffy on the otherhand was a mixed bag. Not sure how I feel about them developing a new Scrappy gang to offset the pre-existing Scoobs, but the intro scene with buffy training dawn was solid. Dawn did have the best line in the episode. Not enough Willow or Anya. But the final sequence with Spike talking to the big bads from the last 6 seasons was quite amazing. Course what exactly did it mean? :)

Finally lets talk a little more about OS X. My days of testing MacOS X are officially numbered. If I don't give Kathleen's mac back, she will destroy me with her sharks with friggin' laser beams attached to their heads. She is cranky because I installed Jaguar, and some apps, and now her applications menu is cluttered and her mail program is all different. She'll heal, but I still feel bad- she's been very tolerant letting me use her laptop for the last few days. She's good.

I still have a few issues with the OS, but I've worked through most of them at this point. Now that I have the major OS keybindings down pat I can move fairly quickly. And creating .term files accelerated my ssh'ing into other boxes. Switching to bash, moving some aliases over, its all really coming together. I still have some video files that don't play correctly that worked fine with xine & avifile under Linux so I may have to install xine for OS X, but I'm quite certain that won't pull it off.

iCal is smooth. I'm really interested in exploring DAV more. I'm gonna put mod_dav on a box in the office to experiment with a bit. I wonder what sort of interfaces we could put into Slashdot. A sherlock interface would be super sweet too. One that perhaps showed the top stories, or a tree view of comments. I really wish iTunes had multiple libraries. I have different MP3 collections at home and at the office, and would love to be able to have the 'Location' menu option keep track of that for me. I also need to figure out how to automount file servers as I roam from home to the office- Ryooki should unmount when I'm at work and Akane should appear in its place. Once again, I assume that Apple Script is the way to go here. I'd prefer to use perl tho I need to learn more about each.

I still have yet to play with fink, but I've decided that installing that is just to much until I get my own Mac, which I have decided to do soon. I'm trying to find a good connection to get a discounted TiBook. What I'd really like to do is write a story where I switch for a couple months, using it as my primary laptop, and sort of log the things that I had to change both in my work habits and MacOS X to function. As a long time unix user, I think I could provide good perspective for other long time unix users who may be tempted to jump to the Mac, but unsure about the tradeoffs that they will have to make. Unfortunately I've had little luck finding contacts at Apple who have the authority to hook me up, and I really shouldn't go down to CompUSA and shell out $4k. Ouch.